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Poster:	Romualdus	Date:	February 15, 2007 12:32:58pm
Forum:	general	Subject:	What to do with ZIP files downloaded for "Bibliotheca Alexandrina" books in Italian

Dear all,

Because I live in Italy and read Italian, I have searched on Internet Archive for books in Italian and found a large number of entries (e.g., searching for texts with "Italia"). Most of these entries have no bibliographic information besides a title in hyphenated form, and a notation that the book comes from "Bibliotheca Alexandrina". These books are only available by ftp, and in the ftp directory one typically finds several large files, all of them with a .zip extension.

For instance, for one book on "Brigantaggio" (ftp://ia301337.us.archive.org/2/items/Il-Brigantaggio-Politico-Ant-it), the ftp directly lists the following three large files (file size and file name):

15,403,290 Il-Brigantaggio-Politico-Ant-it_OTIFF.zip
5,947,019 Il-Brigantaggio-Politico-Ant-it_PTIFF.zip
8,769,744 Il-Brigantaggio-Politico-Ant-it_TXT.zip

I figured out that the OTIFF files were the original TIFF images, and the PTIFF files the trimmed images, and I have downloaded one book in PTIFF and am planning to reassemble it into a multipage TIFF document using something like IrfanView.

My problem is with the "_TXT.zip" files, which typically are a bit larger than the "_PTIFF.zip" files. I downloaded such a "_TXT.zip" file for the book "Arcipelago-Gulag-Ale-it" (an Italian translation of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", though no entry for Solzhenitsyn is given for it in the catalog), and when I had finished downloading it, I found that the zip folder contained the following:

1. A ".tif" image file for each page.
2. A ".frf" file for each page.
3. A 12-kB file named "_FRBatch.pac"
4. Four 1-kB files with these names:
desktop.ini
FRBatch.opt
packet.ico
textlang.dat

My question is, what am I supposed to do with all of these things? If I just assembled the TIF files I would have the whole book in images, but what I downloaded was the "_TXT.zip" file, and in fact when I open the FRF files with something like WordPad I see inside at the top of each file some instructions about font type and language (followed by a horde of strange symbols).

Searching on Google for "FRF" I came across a website of someone who mentions using FRF files in the process of compiling DjVu documents, so I am wondering whether this "_TXT.zip" file is meant to be compiled by the user into some sort of DjVu file.

Is that correct? If not, what can an ordinary end user do to make one of these "_TXT.zip" files useable?

Thank you very much for your help.

Romualdus